2000-10-10 04:00:00 PDT Tampa, Fla. -- THIS IS the election in which the voters should fire the pollsters or the pollsters should fire the voters. The polls are unstable and frequently contradict each other. Old rules fly out the window. Presidential candidates campaign in places you wouldn't expect to find them.

Florida is one of those places. The conventional wisdom says George W. Bush shouldn't be battling for what's supposed to be a rock-solid Republican state that his brother, Gov. Jeb Bush, should deliver.

The battle for Florida challenges the old assumption that the movement of so many Americans to the Sun Belt was good for the Republican Party. During the 1980s, that proved to be true. But the theory didn't take into account the possibility that the newcomers would transform the Sun Belt. Curt Kiser, a Republican lobbyist who spent two decades in the Florida Legislature, cites the case of Broward County to make the point.

Broward County was "solid Republican" before retired union members and public employees from New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts moved in. "As more of your blue-collar and union and public-employee retirees started moving in, the county started to change," says Kiser, and became more Democratic.

Matthew Dowd, the Bush campaign's director of polling and media planning, says that the election results in the 1990s show that Florida "has gone from being a Republican state to being a swing state."

There are many reasons for this, not the least being the huge influx of immigrants from the Caribbean and Central and South America over the past two decades.

Dowd sees Florida as just one example of how many popular ideas about the nation's electoral map are wrong. If Florida and New Jersey are now friendlier to Democrats than they were in the recent past, states such as Oregon, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin now offer opportunities for Bush that few expected.

The transformations here are not just about demographics. Sen. Connie Mack, a Republican who is retiring this year, says if anything, demographics have run in the Republicans' favor. "Since 1988 when I first ran, there are 600,000 net more registered Republicans," he said. What has changed is the issues. "In 2000, the issues are health care, education and the environment." The dynamics of politics, he says, have changed more than the demographics.

These dynamics matter to senior citizens. "There is a word that unites retirees, and that word is security," says Sen. Bob Graham, a Democrat and former governor.

In the 1980s, Graham says, "the main threat to security was taxes," and that helped Republicans. "Today, in this period of prosperity, the threat of higher taxes has little reality," he says. "What has replaced taxes as a source of insecurity is health care -- and, in particular, the cost of prescription drugs."

Rep. Jim Davis, a Democrat who represents the Tampa area, says Al Gore has an opportunity to upend Bush's Medicare program, which relies on pushing more seniors into health maintenance organizations. HMOs, he says, are in very bad repute here because of recent "really remarkable" premium increases. The battle over the budget surplus could also help Gore. Many of his moderate, middle-class constituents, Davis says, are more sympathetic to paying down the national debt than to large tax cuts. Davis' analysis explains why the Bush campaign is so eager to move off the issues and onto Gore's proclivity toward embellishment.

If George W. Bush loses Florida, it won't be because of his brother Jeb. The race here hangs on national issues that, in truth, will decide the election everywhere else.

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